Destroyer Angel: An Anna Pigeon Novel (Anna Pigeon Mysteries)

by Barr, Nevada

  Faintly Heath heard—or thought she heard—footsteps. Without further warning, a blinding light slashed across her eyes. One of the thugs had seen the fire, had come, was here. Fear gave her one last ounce of strength. She used it to snatch up handfuls of dirt. Flinging them at Wily, she cried, “Run, God damn you! Run!”

  Like everything else she’d tried to accomplish, she failed at getting rid of the dog, too.

  FORTY-FIVE

  Buoyed up by the prospect of committing mayhem, Anna strong-armed her tired mind out of its cozy self-pity. In her frantic need to find Heath and Wily, she had ignored the rules of tracking, but she couldn’t be very lost. The men, the plane, Heath, open space, had to be within fifteen to thirty yards from where she sat on the rock. Opening ears and nose to the night, she waited for information. A breeze, a mere breath down in the trees, touched her forehead and cheeks. The weather had been blowing in from the northwest. She’d left the old logging camp on the northeast side. Therefore the clearing was on her left.

  Heath and the others had been at the northernmost end of the open area. That meant Heath had to be ahead of her and slightly to the left. Rising, Anna turned on her headlamp and waited another minute. Very faintly, to her left and behind, she could hear a sound that was not of the wind or the trees or the night creatures: the uneven yaps of human laughter.

  Breathing deeply and evenly, she unearthed patience and concentration. Breeze on her forehead, man-sound behind and to the left, headlamp trained on the forest floor, eyes alert for the smallest of sign, she moved slowly forward.

  The spoor that marked the place where the thugs had stopped was not subtle. Suddenly the beam of her light ignited. Red, bright and gorgeous and loud, blood shouted up from the brown of the duff, gleamed in a great glorious ruby pool. Freshly spilled blood, still humming with color and life, was beautiful. Few appreciated it. When not sealed tightly in living containers, blood was jarring. Splashed across leaves and rocks it was obscene, graffiti profaning sacred ground.

  Following smears of red, Anna quickly rewon the edge of the logging camp. While still in the trees, she turned off her headlamp, then flipped the lens so it rested on her forehead. Cloaked in darkness, she stepped from cover.

  She had fully expected to see Heath in the dimly lighted expanse, but there was no woman, no dog. At the far end of the old camp, the thugs’ fire burned cheerily. Several yards away from where she stood, the plane squatted, sinister with the promise of abduction. Cigarette smoke trickled through the breeze to Anna’s nose. Mixed with it was the unmistakable odor of burning vegetation. Under the near wing of the small plane, screened from the thugs by the wheels, a blue snake of creeping flame curled out of the darkness, a tendril alive and seeking. Thrashing between the small horns of the fiery reconnaissance line was a dark form.

  Anna ran lightly over the ground to duck under the shadow of the wing. The firelight showed her Heath, naked except for a pair of white panties with bits of grass stuck to them, floundering feebly, like a fish too long out of water. From hip to ankle, her left leg was drenched in blood. As ineffectual as a newborn baby, she was trying to drag herself from the reaching flames.

  Wily, a growl rumbling in his shaggy chest, was lunging awkwardly, staggering and snapping at the line of fire. He made a strangled sound, then a stumbling rush at Anna. His teeth bit down on her ankle.

  “It’s me, doggone it!” Anna hissed. “Let go. Goddammit, it’s me!” She turned on her light. It hit Heath, and she let out a mousy squeak, then began to keen. Wily bit down harder.

  “Stop it,” Anna snapped at the dog. She pulled the light out on its elastic band and aimed it down onto her face. “It’s me.” The keening didn’t cease.

  Anna removed Jimmy’s hat.

  “Thank God,” Heath breathed, and her face hit the grass as she passed out or dropped dead.

  Wily unlocked his jaws.

  “About time,” Anna muttered. Again she turned off the headlamp. The aluminum skin of the plane responded to the halogen light with silver lightning bolts. Somebody was bound to notice.

  “And you damn well owe me one,” she added as Wily’s chagrined muzzle winked into shadow. Half hangdog, half cocky, he hobbled over and sat next to Heath. Hoping the moose hide was still intact on her moccasins, Anna began stomping out the flickering orange and blue line. From his mistress’s side Wily watched closely until the last of the enemy had been crushed into the soil.

  The main part of the fire had shrunk to the size of a softball; still, it was too big and too hot for Anna to trust her moccasins to it. First things first, she told herself.

  “Move over,” she ordered the dog as she knelt next to Heath. Being as gentle as she could with only one functional arm, Anna rolled Heath onto her back. Her skin was cool to the touch, eyes half closed, mouth slack. Her hands fluttered as if she were trying to help.

  Anna bent down and put her lips against Heath’s ear. “Can you hear me?”

  “It’s me, doggone it.” Heath’s words were so slurred as to be almost unintelligible.

  Anna laughed quietly. Heath didn’t respond. Heath hadn’t been trying to lighten the mood; she just echoed Anna’s words. Even if she didn’t bleed to death from the bullet the dude or Reg put in her leg, Heath was not out of danger. Hypothermia, trauma, hunger, thirst, exhaustion: The thugs had created the perfect recipe for shock. Anna had treated dozens of cases, but few had had all the deadly ingredients.

  Mouth still next to Heath’s ear, Anna murmured, “We can’t stay here. I have to have light.” With that announcement of misery to come, she tried to manhandle Heath into the fireman’s carry she’d used on Jimmy. Though Heath was twenty pounds lighter than the bearded thug, using only one arm Anna couldn’t lift her the eighteen inches needed to pull her into place.

  Heath moaned.

  Wily whimpered grievously.

  “You didn’t whimper when I got shot,” Anna whispered acerbically. Wily said nothing.

  Working quickly, Anna shoved Sean’s knife through her belt, then let the purloined coat slide off her shoulders. The fabric adhered to the blood on her upper arm. Gritting her teeth so hard she heard her jaw crack, she tugged the left sleeve down. The coat fell to the ground, exposing an arm black with dried blood. With no pocket except that in her trousers, Anna tucked the hand at the end of her injured arm in the waistband of her pants. It wasn’t as good a sling as the sleeve and pocket had proven, but it would reduce movement and pain.

  Working awkwardly, she spread the coat on the ground. “Sorry, soon over, here we go,” she muttered as she rolled Heath onto the coat and arranged her in a fetal position. “Hug your knees. Hang on,” she told Heath and, clutching the cuffs of both sleeves in her right fist, inch by inch, began dragging the coat with its burden toward the tree line.

  “No,” Heath gasped. “Feed the fire … reach the gas tank.”

  Fuel to build up the fire was too far away, too hard to find in the dark.

  “Never mind,” Anna said. “After we get you situated, I’ll get in the cockpit and start slashing wires. I’m bound to bust something.”

  Every time the coat jerked over a rough spot, Anna worried Heath would cry out. When she didn’t, Anna worried she’d killed her.

  “Am I hurting you?” she asked.

  “I don’t feel … right,” Heath managed.

  Anna doubted any of them, including the thugs, was feeling right.

  Inch by inch.

  Finally, they reached the safety of the trees. Letting go of the sleeves, Anna fell back on her butt. Jarred into grievance, the bullet wound sent waves of nausea to her stomach. Wily nosed his head under her good arm. “Don’t worry, buddy. I’m not quitting on Heath. Slave driver,” she added, turning on her headlamp to assess Heath’s injuries.

  “Shot in the thigh,” Anna began her cataloguing. Using half of her water and the cuff of Jimmy’s coat, she sponged away the blood. “Neat entry. Didn’t hit the femoral artery.”

  Heath made a whu
ffing sound uncannily like Wily’s laugh.

  “Right,” Anna said. “You’d be dead. I don’t think the bullet broke any bones. I don’t know how shock works when you can’t feel pain, but a broken femur registers in all other systems. Let’s roll you onto your side.

  “Exit wound is a nasty bugger—that’s medical jargon. I don’t expect you to understand it,” Anna said and was rewarded by another whuff. “You lost a chunk of meat about the size of a baby’s fist. Still bleeding, but not gushing.” There was no point in listing the minor damages. Knowing how scraped, punctured, and bruised her legs and feet were would only serve to increase anxiety and worsen shock.

  Using Jimmy’s knife, Anna hacked and tore the lining out of the coat and fashioned a pressure bandage around Heath’s thigh. One-armed, she piled up duff and leaves to make a soft bed, raised and warmer than bare ground, then wrapped Heath in the coat. Jimmy’s coat only covered her halfway down to her knees. Her poor pale legs cold and bare, she resembled a red-and-black all-day sucker on a white stick.

  “Lie down next to her,” Anna told Wily. “Share your heat.”

  Wily shot her an aggrieved look that suggested he was going to do that anyway, then lay down alongside his mistress.

  Anna was building up more leaves to elevate and protect Heath’s legs when eerie high-pitched notes tickled through the trees, seeking out her ears and their whereabouts.

  “Whistling,” Anna realized. Her father whistled like that when he was deep in thought, building houses in his mind or laying fence line. “Whistling through his teeth,” she said. She laid the headlamp near Heath.

  “Wait here,” she whispered to Wily, then silently slipped out of the trees. Despite having the cold tuneless whistle to guide her, it took a moment to locate the source. It manifest as the burning end of a cigarette floating through the air fifty feet or so from the airplane.

  “Anything?” came a yell, weak with distance, but clear in the crisp air of the autumn night.

  “Must have left a butt unstomped,” was the shouted response.

  The thugs had finally spotted the tiny fire behind the plane’s wheels. Fortunately, the pilot attributed it to not putting out his cigarette properly.

  The circle of orange vanished. He’d turned his back.

  “When I holler, you hold the flashlight for me,” he shouted. “I’m going to taxi her up near the fire. She’s getting lonesome out here.” The burning cigarette end reappeared, followed by the crunching shuffling of a man walking without sufficient light.

  Behind the red ember, Anna was beginning to make out the shape of the smoker. He was less than twenty feet from the plane. Once the machine was parked near the thugs’ camp, there would be no jimmying open of doors and cutting wires. Come daylight, the plane would lift off with Elizabeth, Leah, and Katie.

  Anna slipped Sean’s overgrown knife from the belt of her trousers. Clutching it in her fist, she sprinted toward the oncoming figure. Running on pure instinct and adrenaline, no thoughts sullied her mind or slowed her reflexes.

  She was on him before he realized she existed. Knife tucked firmly against her side beneath her arm, blade pointed behind her, she curled up like a sow bug and rolled into the man’s legs. Hard boot leather ripped into her ear. Her injured shoulder shrieked through her bones that she was going to die. Eyesight dimmed.

  With a startled “Huh?” the pilot flew ass over teakettle. The thud when he hit the ground was loud enough to be encouraging. Back on her feet, Anna staggered for the airplane, her balance out of whack, her vision doubled. The edge of the wing and the pointed tip of one wheel cover were limned in silver, rendered visible by light ten million years old. It occurred to her she probably should have killed the pilot, but in her condition it wouldn’t have been a sure thing.

  “Hey! Hey, goddammit! Get me some help down here. You! Get away from that! Touch her and I swear to Christ I’ll cut your balls off and feed them to the pigs.”

  Anna was so close she could have reached out and touched the propeller when he caught her. A huge hand closed on her upper arm. Ruined flesh crushed the bullet into her ulna. Agony drove her to her knees. She willed nerveless fingers not to drop the knife. A boot slammed into her ribs, knocking her to her side. Using the force of the kick and the fall, she rolled beneath the airplane’s engine, into the triangle between the nose and side wheels. Disoriented, she tried to crawl from under the plane, sticking her head out at the precise place where the pilot was standing.

  A boot ricocheted off her temple. Swinging her head the way a bull does when deciding whom to gore first, she fixed on the barely flickering light from Heath’s fire—no bigger than a baseball, and the flames so few she could count them—and wormed toward it.

  The flames were less than a foot from her nose when she squirmed from beneath the plane. Using the wheel and the side of the fuselage, she clawed her way to her feet. The knife was still held tightly in her hand. Bracing her right forearm against the pilot’s window, she stepped up the fourteen inches to the top of the aluminum wheel cover. In order to retain her balance, she reached for the strut with her left hand.

  The arm was finished. It moved only a few inches. Her fingers would not flex. Had she been able to reach the strut, she couldn’t grip it. She needed two good hands, one to anchor herself and one to wield the knife.

  “Come out of there,” the pilot shouted. “I’m going to break you in so many pieces you’ll have to be vacuumed up. Help! Get me some help down here!”

  Boot leather thudded on aluminum as the pilot kicked and poked under the nose of the plane, trying to locate the intruder.

  “What you got?” Reg.

  “Get me some light,” the pilot yelled. “Bring the flashlight, God damn it!”

  “Keep your fuckin’ pants on, man.” Reg’s voice was closer. He was coming to see what the fracas was about; Reg with a Walther PPK.

  Once light hit her, a bullet would hit her, or a man would hit her. Anyway she looked at it, she had about three seconds to live.

  Anna put the blade of the knife between her teeth. Leaning against the cabin for support, she grabbed her wounded arm with her good hand and lifted the miserable screaming thing upward until her wrist reached the V between the top of the strut and the wing. With a scream, she jammed her wrist until the bones were wedged tight between the metal of the strut and the underside of the wing.

  The arm stabilized her.

  Pain had gone beyond pain into a blanketing wave, the precursor of unconsciousness. Before she could succumb, she clutched the hilt of the knife in her right hand, then stabbed upward with every ounce of strength she could muster.

  The plane’s aluminum skin was thin. Dull as it was, Sean’s knife pierced it.

  “Thankyoubabyjesus,” Anna murmured.

  Liquid trickled down her arm. The dangerous, sweet smell of gas burned in her nose. The drip was slow; by the time the fumes reached the fire and ignited, she would have pried her wrist from its trap and be halfway back to the woods.

  A flashlight beam cut a slash of silver from the trailing edge of the wing, then a dusty swath across her belly.

  “He’s after the goddam airplane!” the pilot shouted.

  Screaming down the pain like a wounded panther, Anna wrenched the handle of the knife, twisting the blade. Gasoline gushed out, pouring down her arm and shoulders.

  Roaring wordlessly, the pilot slammed into her. Her wrist tore free from the strut. Her feet were knocked from their perch. Airborne, her body flew a dozen feet before it smashed to the ground.

  A whoosh of air and blinding light illuminated the underside of the wing and the fuselage. Waving his arms and shrieking the way Anna had seen a hundred stuntmen do in a hundred movies, the pilot emerged from the glare, a man of fire, hands, head, arms made of flames.

  A column of fire sprouted from beneath the burning man’s feet and rose to envelop the wing. The gas tank exploded; shrapnel comprised of seared flesh, fire, and aluminum washed over Anna on a tidal wav
e of superheated air.

  FORTY-SIX

  They were encamped in what Leah believed was an old equipment shed. Three and a half walls were still standing. The corners were piled with rubble that undoubtedly housed all manner of vermin. A fire blazed where a fourth wall had faced out on the long clearing. Compared with their previous bivouacs, it was warm, almost cozy.

  Expecting, perhaps, to have to spend a day or two weathered in at the camp with what he believed was four thugs and four hostages, the pilot had stocked the larder well. For two thugs and three hostages, even after the men had had their fill, there was an absolute cornucopia. Leah thought she was too tired to eat, that she didn’t have the energy to lift food to her mouth, let alone chew it. The smell of cold pork and beans changed her mind.

  Lunch’s sandwiches, the only food they’d had in thirty-six hours, should have gone into shrunken stomachs and kept them full all day. Instead, it reminded their stomachs how wonderful food was. Leah’s had started screaming for more within the hour.

  Because Heath would have done it, Leah was careful to see that the girls got fed before she ate anything. It wasn’t that she was a bad person, she knew that. Well, perhaps she was a bad person. No one knew what her progenitors’ genetics had been. Clearly, since they’d abandoned her the day she was born, they didn’t have strong parenting instincts. Leah was not accustomed to having the responsibility for feeding others. She was barely accustomed to feeding herself. Food was something a lab tech sometimes left on the workbench, and if she remembered, sometimes she ate it.

  With Heath dead none of them believed they should be so callous as to be hungry. Especially Elizabeth, Leah could tell. Young, resilient, she couldn’t help herself and so she ate, but shame kept her eyes downcast.